ALPTRAUM!

How would you define night sweats? Sheer terror? Holy Fucking Hell? You may look to these definitions in what you are about to experience… ALPTRAUM!

German for “Nightmare”, ALPTRAUM! is an international traveling plague conceived during a late night conversation between L.A. artist Jay Stuckey and Berlin artist Marcus Sendlinger. With great support from curators Victoria Reis and Natalie Cheung (Washington, D.C.), Richard Priestley and Milika Muritu (London), Anat Ebgi (L.A.), and Jonathan Garnham (Cape Town), ALPTRAUM! quickly became a horrific reality.

Like a beast born from science fiction horror that feeds on raw energy, ALPTRAUM! collects new artists at every venue it contaminates. Starting in Washington D.C., at Transformer; the works travel across the globe to Cell Project Space, London; touring to Deutscher Künstlerbund Projektraum, Berlin; The Company, Los Angeles and ‘Blank Projects’, Cape Town. Working within the remit of the ‘artist-curated project’, all of the works in Alptraum have been restricted in size and material in order to facilitate the low-cost postal transportation of the show from country to country. With each exhibition site taking responsibility to pass the show on to the next host, the number of works and artists may change or grow, and the approach to interpreting and hanging the show vary from space to space as the body of works meanders on from country to country, like a trans-global nimbostratus formation; Alptraum is the exhibition equivalent of Stephen Kings “The Fog”. Adapting to every environment and growing everywhere it stops, ALPTRAUM! can not be controlled, one can only hope to contain it.

ALPTRAUM! seeks to use the relatively loose but still potent idea of a nightmare as the starting point for over 100 artists from the five locations and growing. Each artist draws on their own personal experience in order to visualize those anxieties, which take them beyond everyday dreams. Cultural differences and similarities become quickly apparent as each artist interprets the concept of Nightmare. It is a model, which utilizes global communication between localized artist hubs and clusters to form an international grouping with the intent of opening a dialogue about this subject across borders and cultures; to delve into the stuff and mind-murk that is collectively shared or completely random.